18 I .... ... .. . .. .. '" """ .... .. . x. ...... .... ;'. : . .:...: :. ."...,' y.- . .' ::: <,,-Ä ..;. y 11// ^ I , ... . .-.--.-: . ..: ... .;,. .. -'h , ,II , I ' '< ..... ..." t .... .':'#;.' """" (>h * * #. <' ,; t# . , , -?i- ð < ', / ..{., ; ......-- ,,, ' -- ?1.: <",.. {, L-= aj!c.; "Well) ArtIe) l ere it is next year again.)) . geon Exchange-on Meeker A venue, right alongside the Manhattan-bound lanes of the Brooklyn-Queens Express- way-has a live bird in the front win- dow named Killer King. We also sus- pect that no pigeon trader in town has more tattoos per square inch of arm space than Mr. Sottile has (none of the tattoos have anything to do with pigeons) or that any pigeon-exchange entrepreneur has a more relaxed atti- tude toward his work. A year ago, Mr. Sottile retired from the presidency of the Allied International Union of Se- curity Guards and Special Police, and decided, at forty-five, to collect his pen- sion and settle down full time with his pigeons. Mr. Sottile is a man at ease- far more at ease, certainly, than Killer, a pedigreed show king, who reluctantly shares the premises with a motley horde of birds, two calico cats, and a collie who has recently learned to answe-r to the name Prince. The cats have been standard fixtures since Mr. Sottile opened for business, last June; the pigeon population ebbs and flows with the customer traffic; and Prince, who almost certainly had a different name at his previous ad- dress, wandered in about two months ago. Prince gives every indication of having attended obedience school some- . where along the line, which makes him far better behaved than Killer, who lives in a cage with a nameless, relative- ly tame Great American Runt. The Runt seems well matched with Killer, both being about the size of respectable chickens. Their bulk makes them too heavy to fly, and their grandeur makes them not for sale. Killer is his most imperious self when he is perched atop a cardboard nesting bowl waiting for one of the Runt's eggs to hatch. Some Greenpoint pigeon mumblers who are familiar with Killer's irasci- ble moods say th'lt if he really put hIS mind to it, he could probably hatch a base ball. As it happened, the Canarsie mum- blers-George, John, and Steve- hadn't come to bother with, or be both- ered by, Killer. George carried a small wire cage containing a blue teager and four Budapest tipplers-or Budies, as they're known in the trade This meant that the mumblers had come not to buy but to sell-something that Mr. Sottile naturally understood-but he let the boys hang out in the back room for a while before he started to conduct his business with them. The front room at the Exchange contains cages, feed bins, a few birds, bulletin boards wIth race results and contest JANUARY 5. I 9 7 l:J information, and a glass display count- er with medicines, leg bands, and oth- er pigeon accessories, but the real ac- tion is in the back room. Six coops there accommod'lte almost a thousand birds, including show homers and fly- ing homers, show flights and flying flights, show turbits and flying turbits, and a variety of fancy Viennas, nuns, helmets, tipplers, and monks-about forty breeds in all. The birds come, of course, in all the appropriate, and peculIarly named, pigeon colors. A blue show flight looks gray to a non-pigeon mumbler, anything dun looks brown, yellow is gold, Dutch silver is red, red is sort of muddy, white is white, and black is black. The terms "show" and "flying" suggest that some birds are bred for beauty and others for their aerodynamic skills. This explains why a show flight caught off guard in a sudden gust of wind usually looks pretty silly. When Mr. Sottile, who sells more flying flights than anything else, final- ly wandered into the back, the trans- action was brief. "I'm keeping the teaguh," George said. "But you can have the others. How much?" "Haven't I seen those birds before?" Mr. Sottile asked. "Yeah," George said. "You saw the mommy and daddy but not the babies I sold you the mommy and daddy ear- ly last spring and bought 'em back in July. Here they are again." "I'll give you three bucks apiece." "Good enough," said George, and he accepted a ten and two singles from Mr. Sottile and put them in the breast pocket of his T-shirt. The T-shirt was inscribed "Maloney's, E. 42nd and Ave. D. Bklyn." George then placed the four Budies in a small cage along the wall, opposite the large coops. ,V e asked what he planned to do with the teager. "Oh, we're gonna let him go out at Aqueduct," George explained. "He's my smoker-a hot one. I liberated him one time up in the Adirondacks, two hunnerd fifty miles from home, and he makes it back in five hours No, I don't have names for my birds. He's just a blue teaguh and he's my smoker." "Why dId you sell those Budie<; if you'd already bought and sold them once before?" we asked. "Well, I sold them in the spring, and bought the parents back because I lIked them, and then they had the babies, and I sold them again today because I'm a little tired of them but mainly because I'm a carpenter and